Donald Judd

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(b Excelsior Springs, MO, 3 June 1928; d New York, 12 Feb 1994). American sculptor, painter and writer. He studied philosophy and art history at the Art Students League (1947-8; 1950-53) and Columbia University (1949-53; 1957-62), a training that encompassed art theory as well as painting and sculpture. His first works, which he later termed 'half-baked abstractions', were untitled paintings in which he sought to simplify composition and to eliminate the balancing of forms that he felt characterized post-war European art. From 1959 to 1965 he wrote art criticism for American journals such as Arts Magazine, championing fellow artists from New York such as Claes Oldenburg, Frank Stella, John Chamberlain and Dan Flavin. During this period he gave up painting in order to devote himself to sculpture, or rather to the object, making painted wooden structures such as Light Cadmium Red Oil on Wood (1963; Ottawa, N.G.) that he exhibited in 1963 at the Green Gallery, New York. In their matter-of-factness and simplicity these abstract works were a logical continuation of the Colour field painting practised by American artists such as Barnett Newman. By placing the objects directly on the ground rather than on a plinth or base, Judd further emphasized their self-sufficiency, as in Untitled (1963; Ottawa, N.G.).

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American sculptor and art writer Donald Judd (1928-1994) was best known as a major practitioner of and spokesman for Minimalism in the 1960s. His works, or "specific objects," display an overall sense of wholeness and clarity and reiterate the belief that art and idea are inseparable.

Donald Judd was born in Excelsior Springs, Missouri, on June 3, 1928. By the time he had graduated from high school his family had lived in Omaha, Kansas City, Des Moines, Dallas, Philadelphia, and Westwood, New Jersey. Judd served in the U.S. Army in Korea from 1946 to 1947. In 1953 he settled in New York City, where he maintained a studio into the 1980s. In 1964 Judd married Margaret Hughan Finch. They had two children, Flavin Starbuck and Rainer Yingling.

Upon his return from Korea Judd spent a short time studying at the Art Students League in New York. From 1948 to 1949 he was enrolled at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, and from 1949 to 1953 he studied at Columbia University and at the Art Students League concurrently. Judd's area of concentration at Columbia was philosophy, with particular emphasis on empiricism and pragmatism. He graduated, cum laude, in 1953 with a Bachelor of Science. Judd received a Masters in Art History from Columbia in 1962, having majored in the Renaissance and the contemporary arts. Beginning in 1953 he taught, off and on, at such diverse institutions as the Christadora Home and the Police Athletic League (1953), the Allen Stevenson School (1957-1961), the Brooklyn Institute of the Arts and Sciences (1962-1964), Dartmouth College (1966), and Yale University (1967).

In 1959, partially in an attempt to support his art-making, Judd began his career as a critic and art writer. He served as a reviewer for Art News in 1959 and that same year moved to Arts Magazine, where he asserted that painting was "finished," and where he continued as a contributing editor until 1965. In 1965 he also wrote reviews for Art International. Judd's writings are compressed and concrete and have been compared to his mature sculpture. His undergraduate interest in philosophy remains evident, as does his graduate work in art history. Judd is considered to have been one of the major spokespersons for the Minimalists in the 1960s, a period in American art when concept and art object were firmly melded. He was particularly praised for his successful integration of the artist's perspective with that of the critic and art thinker.

Donald Judd began his art-making career as a painter in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when Abstract Expressionism was still the prevalent force in the New York art world. For Judd, and for many other artists of his generation, works that reflected gesture and/or the artist's physical or emotional state were no longer viable. Judd preferred to have his art reflect a set of decisions intrinsic to the individual work itself. Although he attempted to eliminate such devices as spatial illusion and reference to figure or movement from his painting, in the end he still found the very relationship between picture field and support to be object unspecific. Seeking to resolve such problems, Judd began working in three dimensions around 1962. His first works of this period were reliefs and, soon after, pieces built for the floor. As the result of his initial attempts to translate field and support into real space, he began to work with boxes, a form which was to become the signature of his mature work. By 1963 he began to produce his long wall boxes, which served as a source for his series of progressions - structures which depend upon mathematical systems and thereby avoid reference to composition. Judd, who had been painting his works with industrial pigments, first made use of industrial fabrications in metal in 1964. By 1970 Judd began designing site specific pieces and by 1972 larger scale outdoor works which reflected their surroundings.

Judd was viewed as an advocate of objective sculpture and non-relational art. His decision to attempt to do away with compositional effects was based on his belief that composition carried with it all the structures and values of the European tradition. Judd linked composition to rationalism, and he preferred to think of himself as an antirationalist. In his works - which always affirm their aesthetic purpose - the artist-repeatedly insisted that the whole is more important than the parts.

Judd's sculpture, usually untitled, is identified with the collection within which it is housed. His works, or "specific objects," are included in numerous private collections and in the permanent holdings of a host of such major public institutions as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, the Guggenheim, the Hirshhorn, the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the National Gallery of Canada. Special note should be made of the following from the extensive list of Judd's exhibitions. After Judd's first and only one-man show as a painter, in 1957, he decided not to show his two-dimensional work again. He exhibited his first "relief in three dimensions" at the Brooklyn Museum in 1962, and in 1963 his sculpture was included in the first of a series of Green Gallery Exhibitions (New York). In 1966 Leo Castelli, who remained Judd's dealer into the 1980s, presented the first of many Judd exhibitions at the Castelli Gallery (New York), a show composed exclusively of industrially manufactured metal pieces. In 1968 the Whitney Museum of American Art mounted a Judd retrospective, as did the National Gallery of Canada in 1975.

In his later years, he designed furniture and redesigned several buildings in and around Marfa, Texas, where he maintained one of his homes. At his death, he was designing a fountain and a railroad station facade in Switzerland, where he also maintained a residence.

Further Reading

Donald Judd: Complete Writings 1959-1975 (1975); offers an overview of this important aspect of Judd's career; the catalogue for the 1978 Whitney retrospective, Don Judd by William Aggee, also provides access to selected writings by the artist; Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, Gregory Battcock, ed. (1968), contains an interview with Judd; Icons and Images of the Sixties by Nicolas and Elena Calas (1971); Donald Judd, the catalogue of the exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada (1975), includes an essay by Roberta Smith, a catalogue raisonne, a list of exhibitions, and a selective bibliography.

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Donald Judd
Donald Judd, Untitled, 1990, Anodised aluminium, steel and acrylic, Tate Gallery
Birth name	Donald Clarence Judd
Born	June 3, 1928 (1928-06-03) Excelsior Springs, Missouri
Died	February 12, 1994 (1994-02-13) Manhattan, New York
Nationality	American
Field	Sculpture
Training	College of William and Mary, Columbia University School of General Studies, Art Students League of New York
Movement	Minimalism
Works	Chinati Foundation
Patrons	Dia Art Foundation

Donald Clarence Judd (June 3, 1928 - February 12, 1994) was a minimalist artist (a term he stridently disavowed).^[1] In his work, Judd sought autonomy and clarity for the constructed object and the space created by it, ultimately achieving a rigorously democratic presentation without compositional hierarchy. It created an outpouring of seemingly effervescent structure without the rigor associated with minimalism proper.

Contents 1 Background and education 2 Career 2.1 Early work 2.2 Mature work 3 Judd Foundation 4 Personal 5 References 6 External links

Background and education

Judd was born in Excelsior Springs, Missouri.^[1] He served in the Army from 1946-1947 as an engineer and in 1948 began his studies in philosophy at the College of William and Mary, later transferring to Columbia University School of General Studies. At Columbia, he earned a degree in philosophy and worked towards a master's in art history under Rudolf Wittkower and Meyer Shapiro. Also at Columbia he attended night classes at the Art Students League of New York. He supported himself by writing art criticism for major American art magazines; his writing, like his art, was direct, forceful, controversial and influential.

Career

Early work

His first solo exhibition, of expressionist paintings, opened in New York in 1957. His artistic style soon moved away from illusory media and embraced constructions in which materiality was central to the work. He would not have another one person show until the Green Gallery in 1963, an exhibition of works that he finally thought worthy of showing. Humble materials such as metals, industrial plywood, concrete and color-impregnated Plexiglas became staples of his career. Most of his output was in freestanding "specific objects" (the name of his seminal essay of 1965 published in Arts Yearbook 8, 1965), that used simple, often repeated forms to explore space and the use of space. In this essay, Judd found a starting point for a new territory for American art, and a simultaneous rejection of residual inherited European artistic values, these values being illusion and represented space, as opposed to real space. He pointed to evidence of this development in the works of an array of artists active in New York at the time, including Jasper Johns, Dan Flavin, George Ortman and Lee Bontecou. The works that Judd had fabricated inhabited a space not then comfortably classifiable as either painting or sculpture and in fact he refused to call them sculpture, pointing out that they were not sculpted but made by small fabricators using industrial processes. That the categorical identity of such objects was itself in question, and that they avoided easy association with well-worn and over-familiar conventions, was a part of their value for Judd. He displayed two pieces in the seminal 1966 exhibit, "Primary Structures" at the Jewish Museum in New York where, during a panel discussion of the work, he challenged Mark di Suvero's assertion that real artists make their own art. He replied that methods should not matter as long as the results create art; a groundbreaking concept in the accepted creation process. In 1968, the Whitney Museum of American Art staged a retrospective of his work which included none of his early paintings.

In 1968 Judd bought a five-story building in New York that allowed him to start placing his work in a more permanent manner than was possible in gallery or museum shows. This would later lead him to push for permanent installations for his work and that of others, as he believed that temporary exhibitions, being designed by curators for the public, placed the art itself in the background, ultimately degrading it due to incompetency or incomprehension. This would become a major preoccupation as the idea of permanent installation grew in importance and his distaste for the art world grew in equal proportion.

Mature work

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s he produced radical work that eschewed the classical European ideals of representational sculpture. Judd believed that art should not represent anything, that it should unequivocally stand on its own and simply exist. During the seventies he started making room sized installations that made the spaces themselves his playground and the viewing of his art a visceral, physical experience. His aesthetic followed his own strict rules against illusion and falsity, producing work that was clear, strong and definite. As he grew older he also worked with furniture, design, and architecture.

Donald Judd, Untitled, 1977, Münster, Germany

In the early seventies Judd started making annual trips to Baja California with his family. He was very affected by the clean, empty desert and this strong attachment to the land would remain with him for the rest of his life. In 1971 he rented a house in Marfa, Texas as an antidote to the hectic New York art world. From this humble house he would later buy numerous buildings and a 60,000 acre (243 km²) ranch, almost all carefully restored to his exacting standards. These properties and his building in New York are now maintained by the Judd Foundation.

In 1976 he served as Baldwin Professor at Oberlin College in Ohio. Beginning in 1983, he lectured at universities across the United States, Europe and Asia on both art and its relationship to architecture.

In 1979, with help from the Dia Art Foundation, Judd purchased a 340 acre (1.4 km²) tract of desert land near Marfa, Texas which included the abandoned buildings of the former U.S. Army Fort D. A. Russell. The Chinati Foundation opened on the site in 1986 as a non-profit art foundation, dedicated to Judd and his contemporaries. The permanent collection consists of large-scale works by Judd, sculptor John Chamberlain, light-artist Dan Flavin and select others, including David Rabinowitch, Roni Horn, Ilya Kabakov, Richard Long, Carl Andre and Claes Oldenburg and Coosje Van Bruggen. Judd's work in Marfa includes 15 outdoor works in concrete and 100 aluminum pieces housed in two painstakingly renovated artillery sheds.

Judd Foundation

Originally conceived in 1977, and created in 1996, the Judd Foundation was formed in order to preserve the work and installations of Judd in Marfa, Texas and at 101 Spring Street in New York. In 2006, the Judd Foundation decided to auction off about 36 of his sculptures at Christie's in New York on the 20th floor of the Simon & Schuster building. Concerns that the sale would have an adverse effect on the market proved unfounded and the exhibition itself won an AICA award for "Best Installation in an Alternative Space" for 2006. The $20 million in proceeds from the sale went into an endowment that enable the Foundation to fulfill its mission, supporting the 16 permanent installations that are located at 101 Spring Street in New York City and Marfa, Texas. ^[2]

Personal

Judd fathered two children, Flavin Starbuck and Rainer Yingling. He died in Manhattan of lymphoma in 1994.

References

1. ^ ^{a b} Tate Modern website "Tate Modern Past Exhibitions Donald Judd". Retrieved on 19 February 2009.
2. ^ Joao Ribas (2006), News Analysis: Judd Auction Raises Some Eyebrows, ARTINFO, http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/13760/news-analysis-judd-auction-raises-some-eyebrows/, retrieved 2008-04-17 

More References

• Judd, Donald. (1986) "Complete Writings, 1975-1986" Eindhoven, NL: Van Abbemuseum.
• Haskell, Barbara. (1988) "Donald Judd." New York: Whitney Museum of American Art / W.W.Norton & Co.
• Agee, William C. (1995) "Donald Judd: Sculpture/Catalogue" New York: Pace Wildenstein Gallery.
• Krauss, Rosalind E. & Robert Smithson. (1998) "Donald Judd: Early Fabricated Work." New York: Pace Wildenstein Gallery.
• Serota, Nicholas et al. (2004) "Donald Judd" London and New York: Tate Modern and D.A.P.
• Busch, Julia M., A Decade of Sculpture: the New Media in the 1960s (The Art Alliance Press: Philadelphia; Associated University Presses: London, 1974) ISBN 0-87982-007-1

External links

• Judd Foundation
• Judd's biography at the Handbook of Texas Online.
• The Chinati Foundation/La Fundación Chinati
• Dia Beacon
• New York Times review
• Tate Modern retrospective (2004)
• Artforum article (02/2000)
• Actual exhibitions worldwide
• New York Times piece by Carol Vogel on the 2006 auction of Judd's works

Persondata
NAME	Judd, Donald
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Judd, Donald Clarence
SHORT DESCRIPTION	artist
DATE OF BIRTH	June 3, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH	Excelsior Springs, Missouri, United States of America
DATE OF DEATH	February 12, 1994
PLACE OF DEATH	New York, New York, United States of America

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